James and Dolley Madison
Page 16
Madison, like everybody else, was ecstatic that the United States was able to buy all of Louisiana and double its size with one stroke of the president's pen. He told Monroe, “the purchase of Louisiana at its full extent…is received with warm, and, in a manner, universal approbation. The uses to which it may be turned render it a truly noble acquisition. It may be made to do much good, as well as to prevent much evil.”18
Settlers began to arrive in New Orleans and the rest of the purchase lands immediately, and in great numbers. Hundreds of vessels began to call at New Orleans as a port, Haitian planters moved there, followed by freed blacks from that country. The port thrived. Within five years, New Orleans would double in population and the rest of the territory would grow at a rapid rate.19
Jefferson dispatched his aide Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the new Louisiana Territory with a team. The pair conducted an extensive and harrowing exploration of the region, taking their crew all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The historic Lewis and Clark expedition not only gathered much material for the future development of the region but also garnered enormous positive publicity for the Jefferson administration. It was seen as a tremendous accomplishment for the country by the people, regardless of their party.
The acquisition of New Orleans, the Mississippi valley, and the plains of the Midwest also satisfied the growing yen for more territory. In 1803, Americans were in the early stages of an obsessive need to consume their continent, to seize all the land and natural resources they could, by any means necessary, in a feeling of manifest destiny that at times knew no limits. The opening up of the vast Louisiana territory gave all of these people a “second” country to roam through and live in. It also gave America, now twice as large, a wider window on the west. The west was filled with Mexico and its territories, such as Texas and California. Now, with Louisiana, the United States could look out at what was left of the rest of the land that led to the Pacific Ocean.
All of that dreaming was made possible by the acquisition of Louisiana. It was not only a deal that dramatically increased the size of the nation but also a deal that set the nation on a new course of exploration and occupation, a new course that would eventually lead to the Texans’ war with Mexico and their freedom and entry into the United States as a state, and the 1846 war with Mexico that gave America the rest of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. All of that was due to the acquisition of Louisiana, and that was due, in a large measure, to Madison and his State Department.
The Americans were not responsible for the Louisiana Purchase; Napoleon was. If the French emperor did not need money and did not have a war on his doorstep, he would not have sold the land. The Americans, though, were responsible for acting swiftly to make certain the deal did not fall through. Madison, in particular, got much credit for forcefully explaining to the French that they had no realistic future in America and should get out of the country, if they could. He opened the door that Napoleon soon jumped through.
Madison did not lose a breath in discussing the enormity of the Louisiana Purchase; he wanted to expand upon it. He agreed with opinions from Albert Gallatin around that same time that the nation should buy Florida. The large peninsula of land, then owned by Spain, plus Louisiana, would spread the boundaries of the United States from Maine to the Caribbean Sea and westward to the plains territories and Rocky Mountains, making the nation huge. “If West Florida can alone be purchased, it is certainly worth attending to,” Gallatin wrote.20 “The possession of West Florida…is extremely important and that if it can be obtained, it ought expressly to include all the islands within twenty leagues or such distance as to include those which are marked on the map.”
Throughout all of this, Madison and the Republicans were sometimes under attack by the Federalists, who chortled at every party victory they achieved. “The election of four Federalists to Congress was certainly a great mortification to the plotting of the [Republicans] of Virginia,” snickered one Federalist Party leader after elections in 1803.21 The Federalist newspapers constantly blasted the president. “Mr. Jefferson, however, has gratified his ambition! Our devoted country has lost her honor! Honest men will judge the lesser evil,” wailed the editor of the Washington Federalist newspaper.22 And, of course, the Federalists never considered the Republicans as a party at all, just political interlopers. “Federalism is Patriotism,” snapped a Federalist editor.23
Jefferson, who had insisted the press could say whatever it wanted when he attacked the Alien and Sedition Acts just five years previously, now bristled at Federalist newspaper attacks on him and Madison. “The artillery of the press has been leveled against us,” he wrote. “The offenders have therefore been left to find their punishment in the public indignation.”24
The social life at the White House had improved considerably by the spring of 1805 and the beginning of Jefferson's second term. By then, hundreds of new women, married and unmarried, had moved to Washington permanently. These were married women who wanted to be with their husbands, married women who worked for the government or for companies that did business with the government, or single women out to find husbands. Most lived in Georgetown, just a few miles from the White House. The single women helped to balance out what had been an overwhelming ratio of men to women in the capital and made it easier to run parties. More diplomats brought their wives, and also their children, to town with them from overseas cities. More taverns opened and prospered. Men enjoyed gambling and drinking, just as they did back home. More small orchestras and bands were available to play at White House functions, and Dolley hired all of them. They also played at the many more outdoor concerts that different governmental and civic groups had authorized. Music seemed to continually waft over the Potomac. There were more shops, in Washington as well as in Georgetown, where food could be purchased and dresses and suits of the latest fashion were available.
Dolley's love for her husband grew during her years as White House hostess. Everyone respected the deep admiration they had for each other, and few gossiped about all the time she spent entertaining men at the White House and the considerable time she spent with Jefferson. Her love for “the great little Madison” was exhibited in numerous notes she wrote him. In one, after she recovered from an illness, she wrote that “to find that you love me, have my child safe and that my mother is well, seems to comprise all my happiness.”1 She told him in 1805 that “your charming letter has revived my spirit & made me feel like another being—so much does my health, peace & everything else, depend on your affection and goodness.”
Madison's love for his wife was evident to all. During Jefferson's second term, Dolley's knee was infected by a lump that soon burst open. Bandages did no good, and it was suggested that she go to a Washington doctor. He could not help her. So she went to a second doctor, and then a third, and then a fourth. None could treat her knee, which she suspected was affected by rheumatism. “Never had I more extreme pain in sickness,” she wrote her sister.2 “Dr. Willis bled me and mother Madison nursed and waited upon me with great attention and kindness.” She was laid up in bed. “I write to you from my bed, to which I have been confined for ten days with a bad knee; it has become very painful and two doctors have applied caustic with the hope of getting me well, but heaven only knows. I feel as if I should never walk again,” she wrote her sister in early summer. It was then suggested that Mrs. Madison travel to Philadelphia to see one of America's most respected surgeons, Dr. Phillip Syng Physick. She wanted to go alone, but Madison insisted that he accompany her and stayed with her for a month in Philadelphia, their old home, as she recovered from a unique treatment of caustics that saved her knee. He ran the State Department from their rooms. Part of the treatment was putting her injured knee into a splint for several weeks. During this time, Philadelphia was hit with another epidemic of the Yellow Fever, the same disease that had taken the lives of thousands in a previous scourge in 1793. Madison, remembering the tragedies of that epidemic, immediately moved his
ailing wife out of their house and found quarters in a neighborhood on the far outskirts of the city, a long distance from the areas where residents were being laid low by the fever. “I feel as if my heart was bursting—no mother, no sister—but fool that I am, here is my beloved husband sitting anxiously by me and who is my unremitting nurse,” Dolley wrote. She worried about her husband more than herself, even though it was Dolly who was sick. “One night on the way he was taken very ill with his old complaint, and I could not fly to aid him as I used to do. Heaven in its mercy restored him the next morning,” she said. Dolley was also pleased that in every letter President Jefferson wrote to her husband, he always ended it with a line expressing his deep concern for her health.3
While they were in Philadelphia, the Madisons were deluged with well-wishers. “I have had the world to see me, everybody of every description. We have invitations from one dozen gentry,” wrote Dolley.4
A few weeks later, after her husband returned to Washington to resume his work in the government, Dolly, still stranded in Philadelphia with her bad knee, wrote in her journal how much she missed him. “What a sad day! I found myself unable to sleep, from anxiety for thee, my dearest husband. Detention, cold and accident seem to menace thee,” she said, and she added that in a dream she saw Madison sickly, lying in bed, and wanted to reach out to him to make him better.5
Back in Washington, Madison spent time at the State Department and also spent considerable time trying to get their always-troublesome son, Payne, enrolled at a prep school in Baltimore run by Bishop John Carroll. He had seen the bishop and written him several letters. He thought the bishop's school would help discipline the rambunctious and irresponsible Payne. “A berth seems at last to be secured for our son & I hope it will prove a fortunate one,” he told Dolley, ever hopeful.6
He wrote to her often. Madison fired off one letter as soon as he read in hers that she was blue. “The low spirits which pervade [you] affect mine,” he said.7 His love for her was constant. Once, when after returning to the White House in a crisis and leaving her behind, Madison wrote Dolley, “everything around and within reminds me that you are absent, and makes me anxious to quit this solitude…God bless you and be assured of my constant affection.”8
Madison expressed his love to Dolley often; sometimes he wrote her the same day that he was back in Washington. An 1826 letter is a good example. He had been detained on business and wrote her that “it appears now not to be certain that I shall be able to get away even tomorrow. Every exertion however will be made to effect it…I cannot express my anxiety to be with you; I hope never again to be so long from you, being with devoted affection ever yours.”9
Those who observed them saw it, too. Margaret Smith sat at the Madisons’ table at the dinner following his inauguration as president later and marveled at how much the pair liked each other. They sat directly across from each other, she wrote, and dazzled the table.10
Dolly and her sisters, away from Washington, did not always enjoy the adulation of the public, which grew as the years passed. They sometimes found themselves with people they did not like who engaged them in social activities they did not enjoy. For example, Dolley's sister Anna Cutts visited Mrs. Henry Knox in Boston, the aging wife of Washington's secretary of war, and a chess fanatic whom she found “haughty” and hardly bearable. Mrs. Knox insisted that Anna play chess with her, morning, noon, and night. She “pins me to her apron strings,” Anna wrote Dolley, and said playing chess with her was “doing battle.”11
Dolley was forced to stage formal dinners at the White House, but at home she and her husband hosted casual dinner parties at which people stood and walked from room to room, mingling with whomever they found. Many political figures felt freer to talk at the Madisons’ home. John Quincy Adams, who would be president himself one day, wrote that he found himself bored at many of Jefferson's dinners but enjoyed life at Madison's house. He said that he and James Madison enjoyed “considerable conversation…on the subjects now most important to the public” and that he found Madison friendly and accessible.12
Editor Smith and others all agreed that Dolley's idea of the open party and an invitation list that included as many Federalists as well as Republicans was a good one. Smith wrote his wife once that he enjoyed the mixed company, different policy discussion, and, he noted with pride, the seemingly inexhaustible supply of champagne.
Dolley's parties were so fabled that people who invited the Madisons to their own parties often apologized that they were nowhere near as wonderful as Dolley's. In 1807, Dolley wrote back to one apologetic hostess, “I must scold you my dear for doing such injustice to the interesting little party of last evening, as well as for supposing me unable to appreciate such society. During five hours I did not breathe a wish for a single addition to it, so learn to think better of your friend another time.”13
Those who knew them in Washington agreed, though, that the Madisons were not one-dimensional, party-hearty stick figures whose lives consisted of dances and drinking. Dolley was a very compassionate person and grieved with others when they lost loved ones. Jefferson's daughter Maria died in 1804, and Dolley was crestfallen. “A letter from the President announces the death of poor Maria, and the consequent misery it has caused them all. This is among the many proofs, my dear sister, of the uncertainly of life. A girl so young, so lovely! All the efforts of friends and doctors availed to nothing,” she wrote. She was jolted even more by the death of her young niece Dolley in 1806, telling her sister Anna, “I can hardly write you, so sick with grief [and] apprehension is my whole frame.”14
Dolley mourned over loved ones who moved away from her. She was delighted that her sister Anna, to whom she was closer to than anybody except her husband, was married to Richard Cutts of Maine in 1804, but she missed her terribly. “One of the greatest griefs of my life has come to me in the parting for the first time from of sister-child,” she wrote after the wedding, attended by Dolley and her husband. She wrote Anna a few weeks later, “to trace you and your dear husband in that regretted city [Baltimore] where we have spent our early years, to find that even there you can recollect with affection the solitary being you have left behind, reflects a ray of brightness on my somber prospects.”15 Dolley was so upset at her sister's departure that she literally shut herself up in her house for several days, until her husband convinced her to take a carriage ride with some friends. Each morning, relatives or friends visited her to console her on the loss of her sister, as if Anna had actually died.
And she was filled with joy when those in her family were happy. She was ecstatic over the birth of her sister Anna's daughter. “Joy! Joy! To you, my beloved brother and to you my dearest Anna…I claim her as my pet, my darling daughter, I wish Payne could marry her at once to put it out of doubt her being my own,” she said.16
Any small thing that her son, Payne, accomplished was heralded by the Madisons to all. They hovered over Payne in Washington, as they did at Montpelier, trying the best they could to restrict their rambunctious son. Their praise of him was endless and criticism minimal, even though his behavior seemed outrageous to many.
One thing Dolley did through Madison's first term as secretary of state was stick by her husband as American foreign policy continually encountered rough seas. Right from the start of his days as secretary of state, Madison had to worry about the Barbary pirates, sea-bound villains who seized American ships and crews in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of northern Africa near Algeria, Tunis, and Morocco. They had been doing so since the 1780s, and the American government initially paid a ransom to get them back. Then the pirates, working under Algerian authorities, demanded yearly tribute to prevent attacks, and America paid one million dollars annually until Jefferson took office. The new president and the secretary of state refused to pay tribute and convinced Congress to assign a small fleet of six frigates to protect American shipping in the Mediterranean. The pasha of Tripoli promptly declared war on the United States.
The Un
ited States found an ally in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, King Francis, who offered American ships ports and supplies for the conflict. The Americans sunk a warship from Tripoli in the Mediterranean in 1801, but the Barbary pirates captured the American vessel USS Philadelphia in 1803 and held it. Forces led by Lieutenant Stephen Decatur sailed quietly into the harbor of Tripoli one night in 1804 and set fire to the Philadelphia, rendering her useless to the enemy. Several other attacks followed as the faraway war heated up. Then, in the spring of 1805, in a daring move, a force of US Marines, joined by Greeks and some mercenaries, marched across northern Africa from Egypt to Derna, a city in Algeria, and captured it in a surprise attack. Faced with an invasion of Tripoli itself by the marines and a plot to install his brother on the throne, Pasha Yusuf Karamanli hurriedly signed a peace treaty. Captured American sailors were released, the war ended, and peaceful American sailing in the Mediterranean was guaranteed, for the time being. Jefferson and Madison were hailed for their ability to win a war far from American shores, make substantial use of both the marines and the navy, and do all of that without getting American tangled up in the Napoleonic Wars just across the Mediterranean in Europe.